1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a device for interactive machine translation which improves translation quality through involvement of a user, and more particularly, to a device and method for real-time interactive machine translation which infers translation errors on the basis of information generated in the translation process and provides in real time a re-translated result according to collections made by the user.
This work was supported by the IT R&D program of MIC/IITA. [2006-S-037-02, Domain Customized Machine Translation Technology Development for Korean, Chinese, English].
2. Discussion of Related Art
The advent of computers marked the beginning of research into machine translation systems using computers to translate between various human languages. Early machine translation systems performed translation through a defined process. However, the defined process could not ensure high-quality translation since it could not perfectly reflect the characteristics of the natural language.
Since then, to complement incomplete machine translation, an Interactive Machine Translation (IMT) system based on an interaction between a user and a machine translation system has been developed. Such an IMT system corrects errors of a translation system through involvement of a user, thereby improving translation quality.
Referring to FIG. 1, a conventional IMT system generally asks a user questions to resolve structural ambiguity of a source language included in the original text, and receives the corresponding answers from the user, thereby performing translation. For example, the sentence “I visited cities in Japan and Hawaii” may have structural ambiguity with regard to the parallel range of “and”. Here, the conventional IMT system may list words that can be objects in the parallel range and receive an object word selected by the user, thereby performing translation.
However, such a translation system can improve accuracy only when mistranslation is caused by misanalysis of the structure of the original text. Thus, the user's involvement in the translation process is restricted, and the system cannot get feedback on the result of the user's involvement. Consequently, the quality of the final translation result cannot be ensured.